Waste, Waste, Waste

2013 November 3

by Rob Meltzer

I’m a little baffled about this story from the MWDN and I’d love any insight anyone has. the story states that the state is going to get $400,000 or is trying to get $400,000 to restore the 1812 House in Framingham, which currently sits in the path of a parking lot project.

A number of years ago, when I was moving my office out of a major commercial building, I investigated the possibility of buying and rehabbing two historic structures in Framingham for my office–the Rugg Gates House and the 1812 House, both of which were looking for buyers. The Ruggs Gates House was just too far gone to be taken seriously as a project. The 1812 House seemed to be something of a fraud, as my memory is that the house essentially had burned to the ground and the current hideous structure currently in place maybe had one wall which dated back to the mid nineteenth century. The Framingham Historic Society provided me a post card showing the structure in the 1950s, and I would have had to demolish the existing structure and start from scratch to get something that would look like the original. At one point, I had actually contemplated buying it and razing it and putting in a modern building, and no one seemed to be raising any issue of historic preservation.

Restoring the 1812 House at a cost of $400,000 of state money strikes me not only as a grotesque waste, but also pointless. Am i remembering this incorrectly, that the building, in fact, has no historic merit?

And if you are keeping count, the state could better use the $400,000 to feed nearly 72,000 Massachusetts families who are facing reductions in federal welfare payments and who can’t afford fuel.

Just as baseball isn’t merely an exercise in balance sheets and logistics, historic preservation isn’t only a matter of preserving specimen replicas from the particularized episode past. The fact that people value the structure as an aspect of place is proof of its value. Saving a structure of this sort with it’s basic massing and formal vocabulary also serves to harken to a legacy pattern of use and urbanistic experience. In all likelihood with the preservation grant money they’ll consider removing the plastic siding and will be able to reclaim some more of the original structure’s essence and quality. Having worked on a number of historic restoration and adaptive reuse projects in my career, I can tell you it is not unusual to have to sift and edit and interpret to find the spirit of a structure knowing the artifact is no longer at hand.

I get that Tom. That would have been the goal if I had bought it. What’s confusing me is in 2005 I thought it was determined that there was nothing historic about it. I had postcards from the 1950s that showed a structure that simply is no longer there. Which is why I’m confused now. How did it become historic in the last ten years?

Call Chris Walsh. More than 20 years ago he gave me a tour of historic Framingham, that came with an impassioned discourse about the terrible damage done to Framingham Centre when the state widened and sank Rte. 9. He pointed out the building at the time, saying it had been a wayside tavern in the old old days. It had obviously gone through many changes in the decades since, and I have no opinion on its true historic value, which is pretty subjective. I do know that the Framingham history people were quite upset to hear it would be cleared for a parking lot, especially so soon after losing the Rugg-Gates house.

I don’t put a great historic value on it, because it’s cut off from the other historic buildings in Framingham Centre. But there’s something to be said for the FSU people hearing the local concerns and coming up with a Plan B.

As for the “they could feed 5,223 babies with that money,” argument, it’s hard to take that kind of formulation seriously. Budget line-items rarely come with that kind of flexibility. In theory, you could also buy 800 tasers with that money, or 16 full UMass scholarships, or a nice boat for the governor, or a mile of paving. In practice, the alternative is that money could be earmarked for some other state rep’s pet project in another town.

I think that was the point i was making. Spending in the Commonwealth seems be be disassociated with any kind of deliberative process. If the Democrats in Boston are really concerned about federal cuts in food stamps, we have plenty of money in this state to take care of our own ( a point I make ad nauseum).

There’s a deliberative process, just not a very open one. The speaker, senate president and respective W&M chairs deliberate in quiet meetings with their members, then dish out the money according to rational argument and political pull. It’s always been that way, and always will be. When it comes to a supplemental budget, even the hint of systematic budget formulation present in the annual budget disappears.

So, in my role as a property developer, I look at a crap piece of property, I get the info that there really isn’t any historic about it or worth saving, such that its a waste of money for me to develop it for commercial use, which would generate taxable income to the town, so the state buys it and, with the same information as I have, and without the benefit to the community that I would bring to the project, decides to rehab a historic 1993 house with $400,000 of the tax payer’s money? Am I getting this right? And where is the common sense with the tax payer’s money is that?

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